# Adaptive Debanding Filter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10804 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10804/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10955/) (2021)
- [Efficient-VDVAE: Less is more](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13751/) (2022)
- [Deep Image Debanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08569/) (2021)
- [Bit-depth enhancement detection for compressed video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04799/) (2022)
- [Guiding WaveMamba with Frequency Maps for Image Debanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11331/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Banding artifacts, which manifest as staircase-like color bands on pictures or video frames, is a common distortion caused by compression of low-textured smooth regions. These false contours can be very noticeable even on high-quality videos, especially when displayed on high-definition screens. Yet, relatively little attention has been applied to this problem. Here we consider banding artifact removal as a visual enhancement problem, and accordingly, we solve it by applying a form of content-adaptive smoothing filtering followed by dithered quantization, as a post-processing module. The proposed debanding filter is able to adaptively smooth banded regions while preserving image edges and details, yielding perceptually enhanced gradient rendering with limited bit-depths. Experimental results show that our proposed debanding filter outperforms state-of-the-art false contour removing algorithms both visually and quantitatively.